The one movie Jessica Chastain never wanted to end: “I had to just keep it going”
When I was a kid, I remember crying when my favourite film had ended. The realisation that this magical world I’d be drawn into was now over left me heartbroken as the credits rolled across the screen, the names of the actors reflected in the whites of my glassy eyes. Cinema really does have the power to transport you to other realms, not just in the fantasy sense, but in terms of crafting evocative landscapes where you can find stories and characters to deeply identify with or be swept up by.
This was certainly the case for Jessica Chastain when she discovered one of her favourite movies, desperately rewinding the end of the film so that it wasn’t over. We can all relate to such a moment – the dawning realisation that these characters are about to leave you is a tough one to reckon with, and sometimes we’re just not ready to let them go.
Chastain has appeared in a wide array of acclaimed films like The Tree of Life, Interstellar, A Most Violent Year, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye since she started acting in the 2000s, even winning an Academy Award for her leading performance in the latter. To become a great actor, she has naturally turned to certain movies to use as her guide, particularly the work of Isabelle Huppert, whose star turn in The Piano Teacher is one of Chastain’s favourites.
Talking to Letterboxd, she also selected movies like Luis Buñuel’s surreal sexual odyssey Belle De Jour and Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic The Kid as favourites. However, it’s a more recent film that she revealed to be one that she never wants to end whenever she watches it.
Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, released in 2019, stands as a firm favourite of Chastain’s, and you can hardly blame her – it’s easily one of the greatest films of the 21st century. The moving tale follows two women in the 18th century as they fall in love – one being an aristocratic young woman, Héloïse, and the other an artist, Marianne, employed to paint her portrait. It’s a tragic tale of doomed romance, with the pair’s brief affair inevitably unable to be continued as Héloïse is forced into a nuclear, heteronormative family life.
The memory of Marianne lingers, however, with Sciamma using tender details, such as the number on a page or allusions to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to illuminate their unforgettable romance. The final scene, in which Marianne witnesses Héloïse in the audience of a classical concert, moved by a piece Marianne had performed for her during their affair, is one of the most unforgettable movie moments in recent years, and it’s one that Chastain adores.
The actor called it “the only film that, when I watched, I rewound the ending three times in a row.” She added, “I didn’t want it to end. I wasn’t OK with the movie ending and me just sitting there. I had to just keep it going over and over again.”
With beautiful performances from Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, the film truly seems to understand the importance of subtlety, with a slow-burning narrative unfolding to great effect. It won both the ‘Queer Palm’ and ‘Best Screenplay’ at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as a string of other awards that cemented it as a true landmark of the 21st century, a rare gem of a film that instantly became a modern classic.
